Armada ships were swarming out of the wormhole, attack cruisers establishing a defensive perimeter around the generators, obliterating the Olyix systems and nearby ships. Missiles and graviton beams speared out from the incoming Resolution ships, countered by nucleonic barriers and antimatter missiles from the attack cruisers. Ultra-high radiation flooded out from hundreds of matter-annihilating explosions, creating a lethal energy storm around the wormhole terminus that reduced all unprotected mass to its subatomic particles, adding to the radiative deluge. Even the fronds’ perception failed amid the colossal overload. Continuous waves of missiles streaked through the chaos. Defence cruisers died, but still more of the armada poured out of the wormhole, reinforcing any gaps in the protective cordon they were establishing, while squadrons of heavy-duty battle cruisers ploughed through the hypercharged arena to strike at the incoming Resolution ships. Controlled by corpus sub-aspects, they were extremely manoeuvrable and extensively armoured. After the first twenty encounters all resulted in the Resolution ships being destroyed, the remainder of the Olyix ships began to take evasive action. Waves of teardrop-shaped Calmissiles accelerated out from the tightly packed formation of battle cruisers, raking short-lived black contrails in their wake as they devoured the plasma they flew through. Within seconds of being fired, their acceleration wound up to an incredible thousand gees. The closest Resolution ships didn’t have time to react before the first salvo sliced clean through their fuselages. More distant Resolution ships increased their evasion tactics to watch the Calmissiles flash past, their colossal velocity swiftly taking them beyond the outermost shell of Olyix ships assigned to guarding the wormhole terminus. Some Resolution ships used suppression projectors, killing the Calmissiles’ entanglement, exposing the raw structure of the small vessels that were instantly vulnerable to both abrasion from ultra-velocity interplanetary dust and ordinary X-ray laser fire.
‘That’s good,’ Immanueel said as they lost the eighteenth Calmissile. ‘We have the ranging on their suppression technology. Phase two deployment strategy is now being modified accordingly.’
Yirella watched more than five hundred Calmissiles dwindle away out into the star system, difficult even for the sensor fronds to follow. Only their internal communication links allowed the armada tactical network to track them.
After a minute of flight, during which he eliminated nineteen Resolution ships, Ainsley increased his acceleration up to two hundred and eighty gees and vectored around in a massive parabola until he was heading straight back towards the wormhole terminus, powering headlong for the formation of a hundred and seventy Resolution ships that had been chasing him. Even though she knew what was about to happen, Yirella found herself gripping the arms of the cafe seat.
With twenty-five seconds left before he reached the Resolution ships, Ainsley triggered another degenerator pulse. This time, his entire energy output was routed directly into a monster electromagnetic discharge, temporarily blinding the multitude of sensors tracking him, denying his opponents critical data for a couple of seconds.
‘Oh, Saints,’ Yirella moaned. She could see Ainsley’s course vector as he streaked back towards them; he was going to fly past the wormhole terminus with barely two thousand kilometres’ separation distance at a terrifying speed. If this doesn’t work . . .
Ainsley brought the ultradense matter shield up from energized suspension to deployment status. At that point, he was seventeen thousand kilometres from the formation of Resolution ships and closing fast. When he reached fifteen, he triggered the shield.
The shield massed roughly the same as a medium-sized moon. In its phasefolded state, it was a disc thirty metres in diameter and one centimetre deep. It unfolded at point nine five lightspeed, expanding out to eighty thousand kilometres in diameter and one hundred microns thick. Boosted quantum equilibrium ensured every compositional atom shared the same state, unifying them.
The Resolution ships didn’t have any time to vector away; they crashed into what was in effect a two-dimensional moon with a closing velocity in excess of nine hundred kilometres a second. Their impacts were simultaneously distributed and absorbed by the entire mass. Star-hot debris plumes were bulldozed out of the way by the shield’s unstoppable inertia, forming relativistic rivers across its surface before cascading over the edges.
Five seconds after the last impact, Ainsley refolded it.
Yirella let out an involuntary scream as she watched the incredible shield rushing at deadly speed towards the wormhole terminus. It eclipsed the entire galactic core, smothering the blazing star; even most of the glittering ring was obscured. Some animal level of her brain told her such a thing couldn’t possibly be real.
Then it shrank away as fast as it had emerged, and Ainsley swept past the wormhole terminus. Three seconds later, the shield sprang out again. Dozens of Resolution ships inbound towards the wormhole smashed apart as it ploughed through them, graviton beams and antimatter impacts useless against its artificial structure.
‘Told you it’d work.’ Ainsley chuckled. ‘The Katos really know how to manipulate matter.’ He folded the shield away again and performed another three-hundred-gee manoeuvre back to the wormhole terminus. ‘You guys ready?’ he asked the corpus humans.
‘Confirmed,’ Immanueel said. ‘Beginning phase three.’
The generators holding the wormhole open began to accelerate at two hundred and fifty gees, heading for the gateway. The armada cruisers englobing it matched their speed. Ainsley took up his point position again. Another salvo of Calmissiles was launched, racing on ahead to form up in a protective umbrella to intercept the incoming Olyix ships.
‘Ten hours to reach the gateway,’ Yirella said. ‘There’s a lot that can go wrong in that time.’
‘Not just for us,’ Kenelm replied. ‘Our attack profile will force the Olyix to divert resources away from us.’
‘I was never sure about this part,’ she admitted. ‘If it was me defending the enclave, I’d throw everything I had into preventing us from reaching the gateway. If we kill the enclave, it’s all over. They can take the other losses.’
‘I disagree. If we destroy their wormholes, the galaxy will have millennia before
